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American Women's Regionalist Fiction

Mapping the Gothic

Palgrave Macmillan
  • Studies American women writers whose views of hauntings connect to their image of an internal domestic landscape
  • Examines how the collision between the local and national can lead to the Gothic protagonist’s sense of belonging or alienation
  • Addresses regions in the US that have their own specific versions of the Gothic including the South, New England, the West Coast, and the Midwest

Part of the book series: Palgrave Gothic (PAGO)

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Table of contents (19 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
  2. Introduction

    • Monika Elbert, Rita Bode
    Pages 1-16
  3. New England’s Landscapes and the Ecogothic

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 77-77

About this book

 American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity—thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways.  The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of “the commonplace,” as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables,  in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930.  This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature.


Reviews

“The individual essays collected in American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic are valuable as perceptive studies of a wide range of women writers, but the book is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. Together, these essays establish the existence of a powerful literary tradition that unites Gothic conventions with a feminist exploration of landscape and place. Monika Elbert and Rita Bode and their contributors provide a compelling argument for the importance of this feminist transformation of Gothic spaces in the United States while recovering and illuminating a number of unjustly neglected texts.” (Alfred Bendixen, Lecturer in English, Princeton University, USA, and Executive Director, American Literature Association)

 

Editors and Affiliations

  • Montclair State University, Montclair, USA

    Monika Elbert

  • Trent University, Oshawa and Peterborough, Canada

    Rita Bode

About the editors

Monika Elbert is Professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. She is editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and her recent publications include: Hawthorne in Context (2018) and, co-edited with Wendy Ryden, Haunting Realities:  Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (2017).

Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her co-edited collections include L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (2018) and L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942 (2015).


Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access